This shocked me. A recent survey has found that, when healthcare providers want to get information to or from their colleagues, 63 percent of them predominantly use fax. 

Even in this day and age of health records going electronic, the annual National Physicians Survey proves that faxing has long been essential to the daily sharing of confidential information between hospitals, medical practices, pharmacies, payors, labs, government entities and other key stakeholders.

There’s a simple reason why. “Faxing is a convenient bridge between healthcare entities that are automated or electronic to different degrees,” reported Alan K. Gonsenhauser, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Biscom, in a recent editorial at Becker’s Hospital Review. HIPAA compliance.  I remember the days when you left the fax in the fax machine for hours and went on to perform another work-related task. But that doesn’t mean faxes can be let off the hook for

And according to Lynne Jeter, that still happens today. Despite technological advances, many healthcare providers continue to use handwritten charts, and when those charts need to be dispatched to a consulting provider, an insurance company, or another medical office, faxing remains a popular choice of communication. Forget about data breaches causing information to get into the wrong hands.

“The primary security risk in traditional, machine-based faxing is that it creates a very public view of very private documents,” Steve Adams, vice president of Marketing for MyFax (News - Alert), a provider of Internet faxing services, told Jeter.

“But what is changing about fax — and rapidly — are the innovative new flavors of secure, computer-based technologies available to hospitals and health systems that are quickly making traditional fax machines obsolete,” Gonsenhauser asserted.

Fax technologies complement electronic medical records (EMR) because they can easily be scanned and integrated into EMRs, allowing patient information to be sent to both physicians and EMR systems, according to Erin McCann. Gonsenhauser added that fax options, “such as premise-based, hosted cloud and hybrid (premises + cloud) fax server platforms are all available now, cutting down costs, driving clinical process efficiencies, and protecting personal health information (PHI) security. “

But where faxing is concerned, HIPAA’s requirements remain a key factor. Gonsenhauser explained that these requirements were designed to ensure security at “the point of dispatch, during transit and at delivery,” and to comply, healthcare providers must place fax machines in an inaccessible area, with access granted solely to authorized personnel; destination fax numbers must be verified before transmission, and recipients must be notified upon receipt of a fax, and cover sheets must clearly state that the fax contains sensitive and confidential health information and that it’s being sent with the patient's authorization.

Faxes should also never be forwarded without express consent, and should be destroyed if not received by the intended recipient. Received faxes must be stored in a secure location, and transmission log summaries must be maintained.

Following these simple rules should allow any faxing of medical records to meet HIPAA rules, and keep PHI only in those hands that have the right to see it.

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